Blessed is she among women who is given these rites to know…
The wind came rushing up the mountainside, cold and smelling of woodsmoke. For one last moment I stopped to look at Jamie in the distance, his sullen swaying dance as he beckoned a car closer and then sidestepped out of its way, dust staining his trouser cuffs and his bow tie coming loose to flop around his neck. Then I hurried on.
I kept to the left of the dirt road, past parked cars, smoldering cigarette butts, an empty bottle of imported beer. Ahead of me Bolerium’s gates arched like a smaller study of the mountain itself, black and threatening. It made me feel faint and muzzy-headed, already drunk. I looked up guiltily when I heard voices.
“…don’t know what he’s thinking, it’ll be frost by the time they open…”
In the shadow of the gates people stood talking. Friends of my parents, men and women in late middle age, faces sun-creased, their voices brittle with drink. The women wore designer minidresses or ankle-length Halstons in harsh colors—bronze and silver, gunmetal blue—beneath furs still smelling of storage. The men were dressed like Ali’s father, in navy blue or tweed; a few wore tuxedos. I tried to will myself invisible to them, but it was no good.
“Charlotte Moylan! I didn’t recognize you—” The casting agent Amanda Joy, a plump woman resplendent in velvet cossack pants and gold brocade, raised her wineglass to me and grinned archly. “So this is what it takes to get you into a dress.”
“Hi, Mrs. Joy.” I gave her a limp wave as the others turned. “Hi, hi, hi…”
“Where’s your mother, Charlotte?”
“Unk going to make an appearance tonight?”
“Your dad here?”
I shook my head. A lock of hair fell across my face, vivid as a pheasant’s wing, and I felt myself blushing. “Uh, not yet.” I forced myself to nod pleasantly as I passed. Behind me their voices faded into laughter and affectionate mockery, the familiar rhythms of people who measured their acquaintance by the titles of shows forgotten by anyone but themselves—
“…when he was doing Volpone, that dreadful musical—”
“Not him, darling, that was Michael Rothman and you’re thinking of Antigone—”
A minute later I was safe beneath the gate—a monumental stone arch, elaborately carved, its threshold consisting of the same coarse-grained granite that formed Bolerium itself. I leaned against the wall and stared at it hopelessly. “God damn you, Ali,” I whispered.
I loathed going into parties by myself. And how could I skulk into Bolerium unnoticed, with my orange dress and flaming hair? I decided to wait beneath the arch until someone I knew arrived. Even entering with my parents would be preferable to entering alone. I tried to remember when I’d last visited Bolerium—five years ago? seven? We had always driven up to the main house, and so I’d only glimpsed the strange figures carved into the stone, like graffiti on a tunnel wall.
Now I saw that there were hundreds of fantastical creatures, so many that they seemed to be giving birth to each other. Birds with the heads of men; cats whose forked tongues unfurled into flowering vines; leaping stags with multifaceted eyes like those of dragonflies or bees.
But then my gaze was drawn to a single figure, carved amidst a thicket of coils and chevrons that seemed now to be eyes, now breasts, now huge-eyed owls with triangular wings. The figure sat cross-legged, its back very straight, its eyes wide and expressionless. From its brow rose two horns, stiffly divaricated as a child’s drawing of antlers. One hand was raised, palm out; the other rested in its lap. When I looked more closely I saw that it clasped a penis, thick as a cudgel and circled by what appeared to be a grinning snake. I grimaced, then very tentatively touched the carving. For an instant I felt a sort of motion there, a faint vibration, as though the ground beneath me sent a warning tremor through the arch.
“Hey—!” I reared back against the far wall. “What the…?”
The grotesque figure was gone. I squinted, trying to find it among the crude representations of birds and eyes. I ran my fingers over the carvings, stood on tiptoe as I searched: all in vain. Where it had been there was only an ornate mob of attacking owls and arabesques.
My fear returned in a slow, steady pulse. I had seen no one else since I walked beneath the arch. The trees blended into a darkness impenetrable as stone. I took a deep breath, fighting panic, and stepped back into the road.
It was empty. My parents’ friends had disappeared. So had Jamie, though the parked cars remained and I could see footprints in the dust. But not only was I alone. I could hear nothing. No cars, no echo from the village; no faraway wail of trains. There were no crickets, no night-birds, no music.
Nothing.
The silence was a horror. Before I could lose my nerve I turned and walked quickly back beneath the arch, into the domain of Bolerium.
By some trick of the light—perhaps the moon was rising?—I could see better here. The dirt road widened into a driveway, its tarmac in such disrepair that Indian grass and sumac had sprung up between the cracks. To either side reared a line of white oaks, and beyond the trees I could glimpse the estate’s rolling lawn. And surely I should be able to spot someone I knew there…
But there was no one, and I could only imagine the cold had driven the party inside. I walked on, amazed at how terrible everything looked. The grounds at Bolerium had always been disreputable. Right now they seemed a wilderness, overgrown with dead stalks of meadowsweet and joe-pye weed taller than I was. I couldn’t even see the house, hidden behind its gnarled hedge of rhododendrons at the hill’s summit. There were no lights to hint that anything was there, no sound beyond the thrum of blood at my temples. A twig snapped beneath my boot; there was a faint popping in my ears.
And suddenly I could hear again. Tall grasses whispering; the susurrus of dried milkweed pods. But nowhere the sound of music or laughter. Nowhere the sound of anything human. A few more minutes and I reached the top of the slope. I stopped and looked back.
Behind me stretched the driveway. Little more than a track it seemed from here, beaten earth winding between oaks and beech and hemlock. I shoved my hands into my armpits to keep warm and looked in vain for Axel Kern’s house.
It was gone. Instead I saw only a wasteland of grass rippling as the wind rushed past, acrid with the scent of dying leaves. There was an unmistakable salt tang to the air, though I knew the ocean was miles and miles away. I shivered, my hair whipping into my face and my dress blown taut against my legs. Above me stars blinked into view, faint at first but growing more and more brilliant, until the sky glittered and the grass shone silver with frost. I stared at the sky, feeling stoned and dreamy and bitterly cold; unsure if I was still awake, or sober, or even myself.
But gradually I became aware that there was something else upon the desolate summit. At the edge of the high moor reared some kind of pillar or column. It reminded me of the stones in the Kamensic graveyard, those carven animals with neither name nor epitaph upon them, standing watch over the graves of patroons and dead movie stars.